Peter, your historical explanation of the split between the camera and drawing
in the 19th Century is quite nice, but it maintains a separation between drawing
and photography that, I would offer, needs to be re-thought in terms of the
history of the lens and the introduction/return, via mostly Arabic sources, of
Greek philosophy
and mathematics to Christian Europe, which becomes the center of scientific
development.

My argument is that drawing and photography are both ultimately a kind of lens
technology--consider the work of Brunelleschi. The different uses of the camera
in the 19th Century--as an aid to science, as an aid to drawing, as an art in
itself, . . .--do not separate it from the history it already belongs to.
Rather, the notion of linear perspective belongs to the technology of the lens,
which seems to be co-existent with the Renaissance and the development of
science in the West. Note that Chinese art and Medieval art do not place an
emphasis on linear perspective.

Drawing and photography both participate in a universe ruled by
frame-of-reference physics. (I believe one of Durer's works shows a grid-device,
which is a tool used to map perspective.) But while drawing takes up with the
ideas associated with lens technology (linear perspective, dimensionality), the
camera, being a development of lens technology, embodies these ideas almost
endemically. (Note: that's not to say that lens technology cannot produce
something other than a singular perspective, just that this perspective has been
the goal of most lens makers (clarity of vision), or that the camera cannot be
something other than a linear-perspective device. Think of the fly's eye.)

With lens technology, Western art begins to emphasize a singular perspective as
well as
dimensionality, and science begins to explore the macrocosm and the microcosm.
One can date the beginning of these changes in the Christian West to new textual
sources and to the advent of lens technology in the 13th Century. The
physics--especially the physics of Netwon--that develops out of the Copernican
Revolution, from astronomers and their telescopes, places great emphasis on the
idea of frame of reference.

JMC







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